 What if anybody on earth could trade with anybody else on earth? Whatever they want whenever they want and without permission from anybody else What would that world look like? What would the political and economic implications be? That technology is currently being produced and it's the subject of this episode of Patterson in Pursuit Welcome to the 62nd episode of Patterson in Pursuit. It's going to be a total change of pace today We're not talking about philosophy. We're talking about Technology and a very particular kind of technology that I'm really interested in I know a lot of you guys are interested in and it's in the news headlines all the time right now That is blockchain Technology now it just so happens that blockchain technology has really big Economic and political implications, which is the reason I got originally interested in it And in fact my first book is not square one the foundations of knowledge It is an introductory book about Bitcoin. It's called. What's the big deal about Bitcoin? Now as excited as I am about Bitcoin. There's another technology. I am even more excited about I think it has even bigger implications on politics and economics and it just so happens that my very own Brother has founded a company that's working on this piece of technology called open bizarre We'll get into that in the interview So if you're looking for a conversation about epistemology or logic this week you aren't gonna find it in this episode But if you're looking for a discussion about the basics of Bitcoin technology talk a little bit about Ethereum and this project Open bizarre and what the implications might be for using new technology To decentralize political power and that's the subject for this episode before we jump into it I want to tell you guys some good news usually. I don't plug Upcoming episodes that much, but I just got to say I have got a set of upcoming interviews You guys are going to flip for in fact just earlier this week I recorded my very favorite conversation of all time which should be up either next week or the week after that It's about scientific bullshit and it is 10 out of 10 Fantastic make sure you guys tune in for that one. I also want to tell you about the sponsor of this show I just had a conversation with my friend last night who works with the company praxis and he said Steve I wanted to let you know that I'm working with the young man who heard about praxis through your show He applied and got accepted now He's going through some of the praxis training and my guess is that he's setting himself up for both immediate and Future career success whenever I hear things like that. It really Affects me because I am a huge supporter of this company I'm not just blown smoke at you guys if you're somebody that feels like your soul was crushed at University or you avoided university or want to avoid university or let's say you graduated or let's say you're in the mid 20s You didn't go to college, but you know that you can do anything that you put your mind to Check out the company praxis. They are built to give people like you Practical job training that is followed immediately by six months of a paid apprenticeship in the real world To learn more about the program go to Steve dash Patterson dot-com slash praxis PRA X is All right, so I hope you find this interview interesting with my very own brother Sam Patterson He's the author of Bitcoin beginner and the co-founder of OB-1 which is the company developing the open bizarre protocol the links to both of our books about Bitcoin will be in the show notes page this week Steve dash Patterson dot-com slash 62 brother Sam Patterson it is a Delight to have you on my podcast one of the areas that I've been interested in for years And I know you have been because we talk about it all the time is the tech crypto world and its relation to Politics and economics where I want to start is kind of the circumstance. We find ourselves and I'd say right now We are in a crypto Boom There's all kinds of different crypto currencies and crypto projects that are going on The people aren't familiar with what crypto is Right now you probably heard of technology called Bitcoin most people at least heard of it But there's these all their technology is called ethereum life coin zero coin Or Zcash is I think it's called now Monero. There's a bunch of different crypto currencies out there and Within the past, I don't know at least the past month We've hit I believe there's more than a hundred billion dollars that's been invested in these Cryptocurrencies the prices have gone through the roof some of them have gone up, you know a thousand percent or more But as the interest grows I think ignorance grows as well because there's a lot of people that hear about the technology the technologies they get excited But they don't really know what's going on. They don't really know what it's about So before we talk about the project you're invested or you're You're working on and you co-founded want to talk just a little bit about crypto technology So when people are talking about Bitcoin people are talking about technology open bizarre They're talking about block chain technology. What is block chain technology in the first place? Sure, so to back up even further We say the term crypto a lot which is short for cryptography Which is basically a field of mathematics that determines how to apply math to making More secure messaging and more security in general of data, okay so cryptocurrency in the world of crypto as we call it now is a sub branch of Cryptography where people figured out how to use math in a way to create More or less digital currency digital cash and that Which happened in late in the early 2009 with Bitcoin was the first time Has sort of boomed over the past You know eight years or so into this space that you were just talking about so blockchain was the first real Advance in cryptography in this in this field that allowed for for cryptocurrency and So that's that's a good place to start so The problem with doing digital money before the blockchain technology was invented Was a problem called the double spending problem, right? So if you have a piece of physical, you know gold coin or or a federal reserve note a dollar And I give it to you right that cannot exist in Two places at once right physically the laws of reality don't allow that to happen assuming we're not going quantum But assuming yeah, I know the Copenhagen interpretation is false as I know from listening to your show Yeah, so That that means that cash works in the real world because either you have it or you don't there's no ambiguity The problem in the digital world is If something's digital I can have it on my computer and you can have it on your computer at the same time So if with cash What if what if I give you a digital coin and give someone else the same digital coin right and neither of you knows right? That's a problem. Okay, so so blockchain Was a development that allowed for people to be certain that the digital Cash or the digital representation of value they had only they had a claim to it. No one else could have a claim to it That is sort of what Bitcoin salt and the way that it does it is it creates a Distributed ledger of the transaction. So Things like PayPal you can say, oh, that's a digital currency and they solve the problem Well, what they did is they just have a big database themselves and they are the ones that are Settling that database. They are the ones taking ten dollars out of my account and putting ten dollars into your account and making sure that Zero is out in the end. Now that requires you to trust PayPal that requires you to trust You know banks do this as well. It requires you to trust a third party trust a financial institution well Bitcoin actually allows you to Transfer this value and be certain that no one else has the value and not trust any third party Because of this distributed ledger. So the transactions will will basically be viewable by everyone And the network that's running particular code that bitcoins based on and then everyone can verify that that's accurate that you can look Back through your history of transactions and say yes, this particular piece of bitcoins so to speak this this digital representation of value The history is legitimate and I know that no one else owns it but me and and so this history of Transactions, these are all collected in blocks and it is literally just a chain of blocks that extends all the way back to the beginning of bitcoins introduction in January 2009 So that's the term that people like to throw around that block chain block chain. That's really all it is is a ledger system that is Maintained by a network of computers instead of one central agency now the question or questions are Why are there so many different block chains? So we have the Bitcoin block chain, but we also have the Litecoin block chain and who knows maybe a thousand 15 to 2,000. I don't know what the number is up to probably more than that at this point different cryptocurrency change so One of the objections that's very common in the Bitcoin space. They go, oh Bitcoin is something that can't have value because look there's all there's all these other coins on the other chains because you have these This type of competition that means Bitcoin the value that It's Creating can just be replicated. So therefore it's probably you know right now. It's in a bubble something like that Well, the first objection there is just a fundamental economic one, which is that all value is subjective So if I say that I want to have You know this digital representation of value on a particular blockchain and I'm willing to pay X amount of you know fiat or provide a service or a good for it Then it does have that value at least to the people engaged in the trade So so at some point you can't say it doesn't have value because value is subjective So it does right right and I know there are some people who believe in intrinsic value and all that but that's another Discussion but but your question is basically yeah, if you can have infinite block chains and competing block chains How can any one like Bitcoin have like more value than another right well? The first is there's network effects right and a network effect means means that the larger the network is the more value It provides to the people in the network So Bitcoin has the largest network effect of any cryptocurrency because it was the first It has the most people using it. It has the most people who sort of believe in it Therefore, it's the most valuable now other block chains have existed for a while Effectively what most of them are are they're all they're often called altcoins They basically took bitcoins code, which is open source. Everyone can see it. They change a couple parameters here and there They change maybe how quickly blocks are our mind There's all kinds of things they can change and then they release it with a new name So The question is why do those have value well It might be that the changes that were made were changes that actually make it more useful for any particular use case So there's one called litecoin Which has some different parameters than Bitcoin Some people might think that litecoin is better than Bitcoin for a certain use case and therefore they they provide value they There are other cryptocurrencies or or even crypto platforms That are Different enough from Bitcoin that people say they provide a substantial Difference or benefit over Bitcoin. So what the obvious one is Ethereum? Ethereum is meant to be similar to Bitcoin in that it's a blockchain except the Scripting system the scripting language that you can use in order to run Programs on this sort of distributed ledger is Turing complete which basically means it should be able to more or less run any any program You ask it to do which cannot be done at Bitcoin. It's much more tight scripting So what it basically means is you have this sort of decentralized computing system That you can pay Money into and have these nodes all over the world running your computer program, right? Now Ethereum has recently become much more valuable just over the past six months. It's increased. I don't know several I don't know thousand times in value or something insane You know is that value is That value because the actual utility is there or is the value from speculation? So that's another part of this of this Crypto boom is that many people are getting into it because they saw the gains that Bitcoin had Right, which were pretty rapid and and significant You know Bitcoin started in 2009 with really effectively no monetary worth in 2010. I think You know someone sold a pizza for 10,000 Bitcoin That came kind of give it his first little bit of value and that's it's increased It's sort of a stable for another a couple years and then it went up to you know, eventually it made parody with the dollar and then In 2013 it got up to about 10 $15 and then at the beginning of the year and then at the end of the year It was like over a thousand so 2013 it went nuts and It's been up and down since then now it's up to like 2,500. It's gone up again But what we're seeing is a lot of people Want those immediate gains they want to get rich quick and so they invest and speculate on all these coins I think a theorem especially has has sort of seen that recently and I I Think that long term There's there has been a divergence from the utility that the coins actually provide in the real world and The price that they've achieved because people are speculating so long-term that will return But for now it's it's a bubble. I think yes and I one note on a theorem in particular because that's kind of Arguably the main people view it as a competitor to Bitcoin or alternative to Bitcoin is in the the world of cryptocurrency and crypto in general the main a value proposition of Bitcoin from my perspective is that it's intended to be a Currency in the sense that it's supposed to be a monetary unit supposed to be cash digital cash This is not the purpose of the theorem though They're both technically crypto currencies if you want to call them that the one is like a money protocol and then Ethereum is completely different. It's it is a it's a brilliant interesting system, but the those Units are designed to pay computers to run programs on the decentralized network So it's totally apples and oranges, and I think there's a lot of people that are just kind of throwing money At let's say Ethereum because I think oh, it's just the same thing Bitcoin to you know 2.0 But really they're just total to totally different systems Yeah, I mean Satoshi Nakamoto the creative Bitcoin wrote in his original white paper The title of it is Bitcoin a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, right? And that is what it was meant to be Now another topic of discussion is the fact that Bitcoin has sort of changed in recent years From being a peer-to-peer electronic cash system and being more like an electronic store value Which is a whole nother discussion, but Ethereum was never meant to be either of those things a story value or a currency As you said, it's meant to be a way to pay for decentralized computing system And I think I mean if something has underlying utility And then people decide to take a thing that has underlying utility and start using it as currency that's totally Possible, yeah, that's that's what happens with even like gold and stuff, right? But if if Making it a store value and a currency undermines the original utility, which I think is what's happening in Ethereum right now Long term, I think that That divergence will will come back together, right? And yeah, well, this is a perfect segue because so the Original reason I got interested in Bitcoin I think the reason you got interested in Bitcoin is a mixture of the economic and the political I Was interested in Bitcoin. I probably heard about it. Maybe in 2010 It was I think I'm worth around a dollar and no I didn't I didn't get invested because I thought there's no way This is gonna work as right virtually everybody's experience around that time I thought now this isn't gonna work and I kind of forgot about it and then was aware it went up to $10 and I was like Geez, this is a bubble. This is crazy. Yeah, I still didn't it still didn't buy it then long story. Anyway What I found really enticing about Bitcoin was the idea of having a currency unit that was both scarce and Easily transmissible over the internet. So it's not it's an it's amazing technological computer problem that the creator of Bitcoin solve but it's also an amazing political and economic one because currencies historically have been Created by central decree by the king by the government by a central bank and Inevitably that always results in the value of the currency being Diminished it always results in inflation or rampant inflation. So this was really exciting the idea that well This is a currency that actually can't be inflated now what I want to talk about with you is Another technology that incorporates blockchain technology and has economic and political implications In a in a different way arguably maybe even more fundamental way so What is the project that you are working on the the company that you've co-founded the technology that you're working on and then I want to talk about the economics and politics of this technology Sure, so the the project that I work on is called open bazaar and Open bazaar is a decentralized marketplace online and in order to explain what that means I have to sort of back up and set the stage for how e-commerce Has worked in the past and by the way to answer your other questions Briefly before I get into that. I co-founded a company called OB one The goal of OB one is to build open bazaar this marketplace and then provide services to users on open bazaar Hmm, that's how Obi-Wan makes its money so Online commerce since The internet has sort of gone public in the early to mid 90s has been completely dominated by centralized institutions So, you know If most of you know your listeners are American they're familiar with Amazon or really all over the world now not just American but Amazon There's Alibaba in China and a bunch of other Similar institutions like Etsy and eBay and Craigslist and basically What that model is you have a company that has a server infrastructure So they have a bunch of computers sitting somewhere and they provide the service to the public of Matching a buyer and a seller together on their website They then take a cut of that transaction, which is typically between 10 and 20 percent They monitor the the data of everyone that buys and sells on their platforms and perhaps most importantly from a Political and economic perspective is they censor the trade that's happening as well They do that for their own benefit monetarily So some examples of that would be like Amazon not allowing the Google Chromecast Media streaming device to be sold on their platform because they sell the competing media streaming device the fire stick, right? So they just censor their competitors goods for their own benefit, but but more importantly they'll censor trade on behalf of governments in order to Obey the laws of their religion jurisdictions and I mean we can go into the Potential drawbacks of that sort of censorship, but you know some examples are are Pretty obvious where you have platforms like in China not allowing certain books to be sold to the people, right? Right, the government doesn't allow it. So So what we do what open Bazaar does is it turns it on its head right instead of having this central meeting place for buyers and sellers And it's controlled by a particular organization that is heavily influenced by the government We actually take the middleman out entirely and we we've created a software program where Someone downloads this free open source program to their computer and then they connect directly to someone else who has done the same thing and They engage in trade with each other without a middleman, right? So if you remove the middleman that means that there's no cut being taken that 10 or 20 percent, you know is kept Between the buyer and the seller. There's no data being collected. So there's no central institution That is now aware of both parties and the goods involved or services exchanged And there's no censorship. So there's no one in the middle that can say yes, you have permission To do this trade or no, you don't have permission to do this trade So the idea is sort of that we're replicating In-person trade, right? Like I can come up to you and buy or sell something With cash without anyone interfering and doing that online permissionless trade and the reason that This sort of is is happening, you know now instead of 10 years ago is that Bitcoin finally exists We finally have this permissionless cash. We have a digital currency that doesn't have any middleman as well So you wouldn't really be able to do this without something like Bitcoin Because you're gonna always have someone a middleman in that payment layer who can censor those transactions Take a cut there or or mine the data there now you allow this You know lack of middleman this permissionless trade to occur anywhere in the world and We're really excited about it because we view it as lowering the barriers to entry for trade down to the absolute Lowest possible, which is there's no cost to using the software. There's no cost to list fees There's no cut being taken All you need is a computer and the internet and you can trade anything with anyone in the world at no cost it's incredible and So as somebody that is that in fact got in interested in philosophy through economics and politics That was kind of the way I run up in philosophy I still say that if you want to understand how the world works in practice You have to understand economics. You have to understand how commerce works commerce is The lifeblood of a human existence. It's the reason that we're all not all living nasty brutish in short lives so the idea that There is there could be a technology out there, which is allows as you say Individuals with an internet connection anywhere in the world To trade and engage in mutually beneficial exchange with anybody else in the world Without a middleman without censorship Five years ago would be like a pipe dream like that sounds like a completely world-changing technology to me Yeah, well, I mean that's the hope that's excuse me. That's that's certainly the vision of open bazaar, which is that I Mean that the slogan is sort of a let's make trade free and that's a double meaning right like literally No costs to do trade but also Free trade in general like we we support people Being empowered to trade with each other however, they see fit and it's it's a big It's a big dream, but right now the only alternatives are to use these centralized institutions and We thought putting out a free open source Alternative and protocol was really the way to allow people to to do it themselves and this this sort of fits into a broader This fits into a broader narrative about gatekeepers throughout history And I mean we've seen it for you know millennia or centuries when you have a small group of folks that Give Approval or access to others to do certain things they they abuse that power So, you know before the printing press opened up access to information across the world You had, you know literally scribes and people in monasteries who were able to Continue the written word and and most people were literate and the cost of books was Incredibly high and you know unless you were Really rich you didn't have access to outside knowledge And and the same was true even in the last century with with mass media, you know, you had maybe maybe a half dozen radio Channels in a given market, you know Maybe that number of TV stations. They all told you more or less the same news It was all very tightly centrally controlled and when the internet came in it busted all of that up one hundred percent the cost for people to To trade is so to speak to transmit information to each other came down extremely low almost zero and in many cases and Yeah, certainly there's problems with that in some aspect the signal to noise ratio and that kind of thing but The benefits have massively outweighed the cost in my mind and that finally happened with money with Bitcoin But it didn't happen with trade up until very recently and I think that's been, you know, a huge detriment So now hopefully we're reversing that. Well the thing that I look shy away from talking about when we're talking about Politics, let's say political theory is power. It's concept of power. The reason I shy away from it is because When I was an undergrad The people that would talk about power and power structures were let's say collectivists in the in the formal sense that they Would have been traditionally maybe on the left and they didn't they didn't like capitalism They didn't like the power structures of capitalism and you hear power structures come up comes up in the work of Michelle Foucault Who's often invoked by people with I think incorrect political beliefs, but Just in the past few years maybe the past year. I've kind of rediscovered the Explanatory power let's say of this concept of political power and When you think about How the power dynamic changes with the internet with the printing press is a good example with the internet with Bitcoin And now with open bazaar. I think it's trending in the right direction Where my political bias is towards individual power I want individuals to be in power to make decisions in their own lives that they want to make I want them to be able to choose their own Values their own goals be able to freely act in order to achieve those goals And I don't like the idea of centralized power be it in the government or in organized religion Or even in some large companies. I think especially when there's connection with government I think you have an abuse of centralized power But when Technology has reached the point where individuals can now Choose what information they're consuming online. It's not the six channels on the television That's all telling you the same thing. It's now and a limitless practically amount of information from all over the world On the internet And when individuals can choose to get paid in a currency That literally can't be centrally regulated or inflated and when individuals literally have the power To engage in trade that they otherwise couldn't engage in I think that is a Radical but beneficial progression This is why I got excited about bitcoin. This is also why I'm really excited about open bazaar because it brings power back to the individuals is that Your position is that the way that you're that you and maybe Obe one and you guys are approaching this are you viewing this as Uh As a really cool tech, you know that has a that has a really cool economic niche to fill or are you guys like Hey, we see the bigger picture We see how technology is being used to empower individuals and we want to be part We want to contribute to that motion, right? I cannot speak for all the people on the team um Or or the other co-founders. There are two other co-founders along with myself Brian Hoffman the CEO of the company in washington sanchez who was uh Was a phd cancer researcher in australia before he joined And co-founded the company with us But I will say this there's a mix on on the team Which sort of value proposition of the software that they find most compelling I personally find what you described to be by far the most compelling part of it, which is I see open bazaar as Joining this long Or extending this long chain of technological progress toward empowerment of the individual Which I think is what you're describing. Yes, that that is absolutely why I'm most excited about it but others in the team I think see the fact that I think they see the existing commerce system that always has the middleman inserted as not being as Efficient as it could. I mean you don't always need the middleman involved in a trade, right? There are downsides to doing that now. There are certainly upsides, which is why people are doing it I'm not not saying that amazon and ebay aren't valuable services to many people. They obviously are Uh, but not in all cases and also you're forced to basically use The entire bundle of services from them that they offer for their cut, right? You don't have a choice to say well, actually, I don't really care about dispute resolution So can you take eight percent off instead of ten, right? Like they don't do that. You have to take it's all or nothing Um, so I think there are some people on our team who feel like The idea of a zero take marketplace the idea of creating this protocol the sort of neutral technical technological protocol for trade Is something that's necessary on the internet and doesn't exist yet and so that's what they're excited about So it's definitely a mix. Um, I mean I see the value in both But I view this as a liberating technology and that's what's excites me now earlier You you mentioned that you see this as something that could maybe Threaten people that that currently have power. Yeah If we were to see a mass adoption of bitcoin and mass adoption of Bizarre and when I mean mass adoption, I mean You know hundreds of millions of people using the software Um, then there's no question this would that would that would Threaten existing You know power dynamics But actually I don't I don't view the success of what we're doing and bitcoin even As sort of this all or nothing Like you have to get a certain number of people in society using it and threatening the existing power structures for it to be successful because What I think I've sort of seen past Almost five years that I've been involved with bitcoin late 2012 was when I sort of got started Is a lot of people strongly prefer the convenience of the status quo over the Privacy and sort of security and Liberty benefits of the new decentralized systems. So there's trade-offs involved, right? If you're doing something in a decentralized way There's no final authority on what's happening. You can't go to someone and say Help me out here, you know If you accidentally delete your bitcoin keys or something right like right that they're gone Like no one else is going to get you there's no one there to back up what you've done other than yourself Um, if someone tries to sort of like scam you or something There's really no central authority like there is with maybe paypal or a credit card company to get your money back um Same with amazon and that sort of thing like so people it's convenient to do to use the status quo systems They're set up for convenience and a lot of people make the choice to prioritize convenience over things like privacy security and and sort of liberty um, and I don't I don't begrudge them or anything but I recognize that it's always going to be A subset of the general population That cares about the stuff from an ideological perspective enough that they're actually going to Take the effort to to basically switch and use these new systems. Yes I think a great analogy to what you're talking about is uber Because there are some people who might use uber explicitly to smash the taxi cartels for whatever reason because they don't they don't like the taxi cartels Maybe they have a bad experience. They just don't like the principle of this kind of monopoly. Let's say in new york city but You don't need all uber. I mean the vast majority of uber users are not anti taxi cartel ideologues They're people who use it for the convenience sake So you have kind of the convenience in the other direction where if the technology can be so advanced As to offer a more convenient alternative than the established system Probably going to pick up lots of people who are who are kind of accidentally and indirectly contributing To this change in the power dynamic because with uber you have let's say a rider and Driver empowerment, right there Taxi cartels of a bunch of regulations about what kind of cars you can drive about how you how much you can pay How much you can charge? Ubers as well. No, you actually have a little more you have a little more free freedom than that so Even if you're somebody that loves taxi cartels But you just prefer the convenience of uber You're still contributing to a changing power dynamic And I think that's going to be the same thing with bitcoin in particular and I could see it with open bazaar too If that's just the place that everybody goes then I have to be as some some passionate libertarian ideologue Just use it because it's simple And I think long term that that's certainly my hope for what bitcoin and open bazaar do is that it's a better choice For all kinds of reasons than the existing systems, but I think right now It's not I mean on open bazaar. We're trying to make that true The first version of the software was released just over a year ago now Um, and there's a decent number of people using it all over the world Like we're we're pretty happy with with how many people have adopted it and are buying and selling stuff Using bitcoin it uses bitcoin for For settlement of payments Um, but it's certainly nowhere near, you know mass adoption now the first Take the first bill that we had is really going toward those ideological people those people that cared about things we care about But the 2.0 version of the software, which we are now Almost finished with probably coming out in august or september Um, it's really built a lot more for people that Uh Wanted to you know get the benefits of decentralized trade the lower fees and whatnot Without having to care about sort of the ideological thing. It's going to be a lot easier to you basically And I wish I could say the same about bitcoin right now. I mean To some extent, um wallets and things on ramps into bitcoin have gotten better, but the core technology itself Um has in some ways gotten worse right because Um, I don't know if we want to go into that here, but basically bitcoin fees have gotten very high and Uh, the transaction capacity in the network is is sort of artificially limited. So, um, I don't know if bitcoin's going to be the blockchain long term that sees mass adoption, uh, because it may not be the one right now that's designed to handle Mass adoption right so talking about the convenience of bitcoin I actually had the same beliefs that oh, it's too inconvenient people won't use it Prior to really diving into uh, in how to secure your bitcoin keys and learning about how the whole system works But after I learned about it, I actually came to the opposite conclusion that bitcoin is so much easier It's so much more convenient that the the current system that the The banking system the credit card system is archaic in comparison You know, you can't do the banking stuff over the weekend and it takes three days for your stuff to transfer and like they They take it's a 20 wire transfer fee to go to the other bank account and it's all regulated and then it can be flagged It's like it's laughably Halfably archaic when With the bitcoin system once you once you know how to use it It's literally just pull out your phone scan a little QR code hit in the amount you want to send Hit it and go, you know, and it used to be instant and practically free I I totally hear you and there's there's certainly a lot of truth to that I will say Of course that that's assuming That's before the current congestion of the network, right? So we're assuming that that's going to get solved and I do have hopes that it will be but Also, sometimes the the ease Of using bitcoin Is is partially because the existing systems Are so heavily regulated and they have so many rules in place on how they can accept money That the cut those companies are forced to jump through all those hoops with the old system and What i'm not certain of is long term Will companies that are accepting bitcoin? Uh Will those companies be forced or or attempted to be forced to jump through the same hoops for their users So the reason that it's so convenient to pull out your phone and scan a you know qr code Is that a lot of times they aren't forcing you to Fill out your name and your address and your phone number right like you have to do the credit card Which is a huge pain in the behind, right? However in the future, you know Will governments attempt to force people who accept bitcoin to go through the same hoops that credit card users have to do I don't know the answer to that. I will say that technology like open bazaar Allows people to still choose to use bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general in the most raw Original form without people having to jump through the hoops Uh because it gives them complete control over their own trade. They can choose Which uh sort of you know rules that they choose to follow and which they don't and that's that's why we wanted to put out a platform that Keeps the original value proposition of bitcoin being this peer-to-peer electronic cash Uh in its most useful form like you have this peer-to-peer electronic cash You want to use it with someone else in a completely decentralized way? Here's the platform to do it. That's a great point It makes me think of something like email, you know Right now the email protocol fortunately isn't like super highly regulated where you have to fill out your name and your address and billing address Whatever every time you send an email how unbelievably Silly that would be and like people would get mad if they had to rather than just type in the message Hit hit the email address and hit go if you had to fill out all this stuff But you're right the cause of that is because of the regulations because the government wants to keep track of All kinds of data about what you're spending money on Making sure that you pay the appropriate taxes and whatnot but interestingly enough if Such a thing does happen in the bitcoin space where merchants are required to get more information from their customers That's definitely going to benefit you guys because that increases than the value proposition of open the czar So the the less efficient the current system is the more you guys are going to benefit from it Well and the interesting aspect about that too is that there's there's the level of optionality as to how how much vendors and buyers choose to sort of For lack of a better term follow the rules as they're set or not, right? So it's not like if you use a bazaar that you're forced to break any right rules or forced to right Everyone can use it exactly like they use any other Platform out there right now, right? But they can also use it in ways that get around all of the regulatory garbage that is, you know Not helping either buyer or seller So it's really up to them to use it however they see fit. I mean we Intentionally built the protocol such that it is completely agnostic as to the type of trade that's happening Because we get that question all the time for people's right about drugs or whatever and we just say look We built this neutral technology. It's a neutral protocol and platform People are going to use it how they see fit and we're comfortable with that and and people say well, you know Uh, what what about these illicit things happening and and in my mind? That's kind of like asking the people that made that built the internet like tcpip that built The smtp protocol for email or the sms protocol for text messages like well Why didn't you build safeguards into them to prevent people from abusing those? Because for something to really truly work you have to try to build it in this neutral way that it can be used However, people choose to use it. So I don't have an issue with that if people choose to use it in a way that is You know immoral that that That is upsetting. I don't want that to happen But for the technology to be useful to everyone It has to also be useful for people that using it for stuff that I disagree with It's a great point and you know if we're going to be logically consistent and we if we were going to levy that attack on Open bizarre on bitcoin. We would have to levy it at all platforms of The exchange of value and the exchange of goods. So somebody could say well, you want to use us dollars Well, what if somebody uses that uses that currency for a drug trade like well That literal bill that's in your wall has probably been used for a drug trade. That's probably yeah, that's probably true So do you go is that a criticism of the means of exchange that people are? You know illegally exchanging things. No same with craigslist. Are there stolen goods on craigslist? Yes There are stolen goods on craigslist. Is that a good thing? No, that's a shame But you don't criticize the platform of craigslist because Some people are using it in a way that you don't approve of or that might be immoral or illegal That's right. And there are some use cases that you know, I honestly believe even if they are Illegal still need An outlet because the ramifications of governments attempting to prohibit them Is much more harmful than just allowing their sale to begin with. Yeah The most obvious one is the drug trade the drug war You know the drug war is a failure in any conceivable way based on any metric incredibly harmful to you know humanity probably speaking and you know if Technologies that are decentralized allow people to Get around that prohibition in a way that make You know genuinely benefits society like like less people are physically harmed in the world Because of it great And and even even things that people think don't think much about like for example uh The counterfeit trade There's a huge demand all over the world for people to buy fake Louis Vuitton bags, right? And and and you know people say oh, well, that's that's fake Well, yeah, I mean it's a status thing right like the Louis Vuitton bag is expensive because it's a status symbol Not because any particular inherent value in Louis Vuitton bag, right? Well, people want that status symbol without paying much money. I haven't heard of this one. That's funny, right? So so there's this market. I mean it's a massive market all over the world And this is one example the counterfeits are all over the place where people know they're buying counterfeits And want to buy counterfeits, but platforms don't allow it Um, and I don't I mean I personally I don't have an issue with that If people wants to be able to buy counterfeits and they know what they're buying Uh, and someone makes them. I you know, I I just I just don't see why that sort of thing should be prohibited So there's all kinds of categories of trade like that That companies and governments around the world are restricting and I think are doing more harm than good Yes, and that print that you're getting at a principle here Which comes up all the time in economics and politics and the relationship between economics and politics Which is when you break down what is required in order for Exchange to happen It has to be the case that both parties think they're going to benefit from the exchange There is a two-way value creation when exchange happens It doesn't really matter the the the concretes of the exchange is the fact that the exchange happens demonstrates something about the expected value of both the participants engaging in it now That's that's one of the counterintuitive examples something like counterfeits where if you break it down, it's like, okay well, it's actually not harming anybody. This is something that is is Creating lots of value for the producer and for the consumer of the good and there's Countless examples like that that nobody's even conceived of I'm sure Of value that's going to be created by people being able to exchange in places that they weren't able to exchange And then there's immediate Uh political benefits if we just Let's say let we'll go outside of the united states because that's where you and I both are but we're talking about china For example china restricts trade all the time like you said about what kind of media you can consider There's the great firewall of china which online they regulate what types of things well They try to at least regulate what types of uh information can flow into your head They also do this through the sale of books so this is an opportunity To get around yeah, that you'd say it explicitly to get around those types of regulations, which I think are immoral Yeah, technically it might be the case that Smuggling in literature that the communist party doesn't like in china is illegal Yes, that that might be the case, but that doesn't mean it's a bad thing if you do it Of course, yeah illegality and immorality are are not the same thing. Sometimes they are um, but often they aren't and Whatever technology can be used for people who are doing things that are illegal, but moral right, uh, I'm I'm supportive of I mean personally I'm supportive certainly open bizarre wasn't specifically designed In order for people to get around any laws as I said, it's a completely neutral protocol Right and naturally, you know as a co-founder of my company Obligate to say that op 1 is not trying to build this in order for people to get around the law at all I mean the services we're going to provide to open bizarre users are all obviously completely above board Right, but but personally because I care about liberty and freedom I want people to be empowered to use these tools to make their lives better right Yeah, I think that's the word for it is neutral. I mean it is a neutral technology and That means it's going to be used for things you approve of and things that you don't approve of and I think that's part of the that is part of the The beauty and the toleration that comes with freedom Is you're free to do things that I don't necessarily approve of but as long as your actions aren't hurting hurting other people You should be free to do those actions and engage in those trades So I think this is where I want to wrap up the conversation if people want to know more about open bizarre What where can they learn about the technology? Where could they download the technology? So if they want to use it open bizarre.org is the website to download Users should be aware that in a few months we're going to be putting out the 2.0 version of the software Which makes significant improvements Um, and also there's a blog if you go to open bizarre.org you'll see the link to the blog We regularly update the community on what's happening. We also talk about Things that are sort of outside of just open bizarre about bitcoin broadly and all kinds of information Um, and uh, you can search for me on twitter and all the usual social media places as well All right, I'll put uh those links in the show notes page steve-patterson.com Slash 62. Thanks so much sam. This has been an awesome conversation. All right. Thanks, steve All right. I hope you guys enjoyed my conversation with my brother sam We've been talking about this technology just privately between us for years We both have very similar political beliefs We've both written books about bitcoin and now he's gone on to co-found a company in the crypto world I'm very proud of him and if you'd like to learn more head over to the show notes page this week And make sure to tune in for the next month as I've got a series of really spectacular interviews coming down the pipeline All right, that's all for me today. Have a great week